The Unseen War

by Lambeth, Benjamin S.

  With respect to that observation, Admiral Cebrowski spoke of a “new sweet spot” highlighted by the Iraqi Freedom experience in the traditionally conflicted relationship between land forces and air power: “My sense is that the comfort level in regard to all indirect fires is going up,” suggesting that ground commanders may now be increasingly inclined to rely on precision air-delivered CAS rather than on organic artillery and mortar fire.44 He added: “I think, when the lessons learned come out, one of the things we are probably going to see is a new air-land dynamic.”45 Indeed, as another account noted, the plan for Iraqi Freedom “so effectively integrated the different types of joint fires that the phrase ‘air campaign’ may have become anachronistic.”46 Thanks to the effectiveness of the combined allied air and ground offensives and to the fragility of Iraq’s air and ground defenses, the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom was successfully prosecuted in less than half the time, with fewer than a third the total number of strike sorties, and with only a tenth the number of bombs that were dropped during Operation Desert Storm. Furthermore, the studiously discriminating nature of the bombing left Iraq’s infrastructure largely intact, and a potential ecological and economic disaster was averted by timely allied action on the ground in securing the country’s oil fields.

  Of this synergy, one senior officer, discounting talk of CENTCOM’s reportedly “brilliant” plan, noted that there are two kinds of plans: “The plan that might work, and the plan that won’t work. This was a plan that might work. It had lots of options in it. It was well rehearsed. All the leaders understood the plan. And when it came time to execute, I think we seized every opportunity to exploit success. So when you combine the effects of very devastating air power, special operations, and then . . . a fairly bold ground attack, all of that caused any regime defensive plans to crumble.”47 General Leaf agreed, saying, “There will be silly arguments about which component achieved victory. It was a combination.”48

  Admiral Giambastiani subsequently testified before the House Armed Services Committee that CENTCOM benefited not only from precision munitions but also from “precision decisions to direct our smart weapons” made possible by such recent improvements as the synergistic interaction of SOF and conventional forces. He attributed the campaign’s success to the “overmatching power,” with far fewer ground troops than would otherwise have been required, that was enabled by the leveraging of the “key dimensions of the modern battlespace—knowledge, speed, precision, and lethality.”49 That characterization, he added, spoke not only of an American style of warfare moving beyond the organizing construct of “overwhelming force” that had been the hallmark of Operation Desert Storm, but also of “a remarkable shift . . . in the way joint forces operate today,” culminating in what he called “a new joint way of war.”50 Expanding further on this point, Admiral Giambastiani’s director for joint requirements and integration at JFCOM added that the success of the joint and combined effort was substantially the result of “advances in technologies, coupled with innovative warfighting concepts joined together by a new joint culture,” which collectively enabled “a level of coherent military operations that we have not been able to achieve before.”51

  Finally, with respect to flexibility in execution, the war featured a simultaneous conduct of offensive air and ground operations in which the use of various force elements by CENTCOM’s component commanders was mutually supporting and synergistic in the operational results it achieved. In a postcampaign briefing at the Naval War College, the chairman of the JCS, General Myers, contrasted this approach with the “sequenced, sectored, and segregated campaign” of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, adding that what made the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom distinct and unique was the essentially simultaneous start of the air and ground offensives. Myers characterized the latter approach as a “more flexible, adaptable, and agile campaign.”52 Although Iraqi leaders from Hussein on down thought that they could hunker down and endure any allied bombing campaign, the concurrent air and ground offensives were more than they anticipated. Ultimately, the intensity and effectiveness of nonstop allied air operations led some Iraqi units to expend as much as 80 percent of their effort merely on surviving by separating their ordnance, equipment, and personnel. Even then, Iraqi commanders conceded that allied forces managed to attack all three of those Iraqi equities concurrently and successfully.53

  Allied air power was crucial in setting the conditions for the rapid conclusion of major combat on the ground. An RAF Harrier GR7 squadron commander who took part in the western desert operation called the performance nothing less than “awesome,” a crucial point that, he added, tended to be overshadowed by the postcampaign insurgency and sectarian violence that festered after the successful toppling of Hussein’s regime.54

  Characteristic of the feedback that allied aircrews at the unit level received from their leaders after the three weeks of fighting were over was the praise from the commander of the Air Force’s 524th Fighter Squadron, Lt. Col. Tom Berghoff, for his F-16 pilots:

  I am extremely proud of the squadron’s accomplishments. We had a lot of guys who were young—without much experience out on the wing—who did just great. They did really well because my flight leads did what they were supposed to. They led the flights, made the right decisions, and took their wingmen and got them in and out of Iraq, and the end result was a 100 percent mission success rate. All the targets were positively [identified] as military, and there were no collateral damage issues—there was no fratricide by the squadron. Pilots made the right decisions, threat-reacted to survive, [and had] no battle damage. We flew a lot of sorties and worked hard. We didn’t miss one of our [time-sensitive target] taskings, and a lot of that was quick reaction, quick thinking. When things happen fast, there is a tendency to make mistakes, but they didn’t. We blew up a lot of high-value targets and supported the Army’s push to Baghdad. And we brought everybody home.55

  Colonel Carpenter, who headed the CAOC’s strategy division throughout the campaign, later observed that the three weeks of major combat made the most of “a disabling strategy intended to ensure the swift collapse of the regime by applying rapid, deliberate, disciplined, proportional, and precise force within fast decision cycles to dislocate and disrupt the regime at the strategic level.” He further noted that it employed “selective disruption at the operational level, used enabling operations to empower the Kurds in the north, and used preventive operations in the west to preclude the Iraqis from employing WMD and/or conventional theater ballistic missiles that would trigger political involvement from Israel.”56 The last of those operations saw a uniquely heavy SOF involvement. Allied SOF teams scoured the western Iraqi desert for Scud missiles and launchers to prevent any such missiles that might have been in Iraqi hands from being fired at Israel. They also performed as ground FACs for allied air power on a far greater scale than they had in Afghanistan.

  The integration of allied SOF teams and air assets in Iraqi Freedom was both a successful force multiplier and a template for future joint and combined operations. That successful integration emerged from seeds that were planted during an impromptu SOF and CAOC training exercise that had been held even before the start of Operation Enduring Freedom. The nation’s earlier combat experience in Afghanistan made a perfect live-fire training environment for the CAOC’s special operations subdivision, whose staff learned a great deal very quickly about the problems and virtues of working closely with joint and combined fixed-wing air power. The Afghan experience also gave airmen in the CAOC a valuable opportunity to learn how to interact with and maximize air support for SOF operations.

  In a subsequent attempt to capture the essence of allied air operations throughout the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom, University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape alleged that the campaign had succeeded in toppling Hussein’s regime only after allied air power “shifted from attacking leadership targets to bombing Iraq’s Republican Guard and other regular military units.” That fl
awed assessment was based on the mistaken premise that “the war began with an effort to shock and awe the Iraqi leadership into capitulating without a fight, but this quickly failed,” as a result of which allied air power was instead “turned against Iraq’s forces in the field.”57 In fact, both elements of the air campaign were carefully planned as sequential undertakings and were anticipated as such by CENTCOM’s most senior leaders. CENTCOM’s air component attacked Republican Guard targets from day one onward, but its main weight of effort, by careful design from the very start, moved progressively from the inside (i.e., those security and leadership protection forces closest to Saddam Hussein) to the outside (i.e., those forces farther away from Hussein—the Republican Guard).

  In sum, the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom was a true joint and combined effort in which all force elements played influential roles and in which, as two historians writing an early synopsis of the campaign aptly noted, there was “little of the petty parochialism that too often marks interservice relations within the [Washington] Beltway.”58 The CFLCC, General McKiernan, later spoke directly to that cooperative spirit when he reflected during an after-action interview: “The big strength in this campaign was the personalities of the various component commanders. . . . You can say a lot of that [interservice cooperation was possible] because of developments in joint doctrine and training. . . . But a lot of it [was] . . . also in the chemistry between . . . the leaders.”59 Such harmony was especially notable during the challenging and complex urban air-ground combat that occurred during the days immediately preceding the fall of Baghdad. Of that experience, General Moseley’s representative to the land component, General Leaf, commented, “The key to adapting to that environment has been open communications and dedicated teamwork between the air and land components. Cooperation between ground and air forces in this conflict has been extraordinary, and our operations in urban Baghdad are an extension of that.”60 General Franks likewise observed on the eve of the regime’s collapse, “The fact is that if you have a whole bucket of air force and a whole bucket of ground force and the rest, it’s a fool who decides ahead of time which application against this pot you describe is the thing that reaches what I call the tipping point.”61

  General Myers added that the close integration of all force elements was “a huge lesson here.”62 His successor as JCS chairman, Gen. Peter Pace of the Marine Corps, echoed the same judgment when he said: “History is going to show that this war is the first time that U.S. forces operated . . . the way those who crafted Goldwater-Nichols envisaged.”63 Speaking as the maritime component commander, Vice Admiral Keating characterized the operational payoff as “joint warfighting at the highest form of the art I’d ever seen. . . . There was understanding, friendship, familiarity, and trust among all the services and special forces working for General Franks. He did, in my view, a remarkable job of engendering that friendship, camaraderie, and trust. In fact, he insisted on it. . . . There was no service equity infighting—zero.”64

  Indeed, the three weeks of major combat in Iraqi Freedom clearly vindicated the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, which directed the gradual evolution of a true joint culture of mutual trust and cooperativeness in American joint force operations. As an early draft of JFCOM’s postcampaign lessons-learned assessment emphatically put this point, CENTCOM pulled together for the second Persian Gulf War “what was arguably the most coherently joint force the United States has ever fielded. . . . [It] developed and matured a climate of jointness that, while deemphasizing various service cultures, led to the components learning to trust each other, working together to achieve unified action. The resulting joint environment and supporting joint networks enabled CENTCOM to overcome obstacles and eliminate many of the gaps that challenge cohesion in an ad hoc joint force.”65 In particular, the campaign experience saw major improvements in the development of greater harmony in the relationships between the Air Force and naval aviation (along with the latter’s important Marine Corps component).66 That process materially helped CENTCOM’s air component to overcome persistent barriers that had once impeded the fullest possible exploitation of American air power and its integration with other force elements in a joint and combined context.

  It would be premature, however, to conclude that the American armed services have reached the end of the long road from service interoperability to service interdependence as a result of their Iraqi Freedom experience. As David Johnson pointed out in this regard in 2006, “despite all the self-congratulatory talk of . . . ‘seamless joint operations’ emerging from [the second Persian Gulf War], the reality remains that within their [areas of operations], component commanders called the shots, perhaps at the cost of overall joint effectiveness. . . . At the heart of the issue [here] is the persistent reality that the services do not feel confident that they can rely absolutely on each other when the chips are down. Thus they maintain redundant capabilities and develop service warfighting concepts that are largely self-reliant.”67

  Continuing in this vein, Johnson added:

  As it stands now, joint doctrine frequently reflects a consensus view of what the services will tolerate, rather than a truly integrated joint perspective. . . . A signal example of this reality is the FSCL, as employed by the Army in both Gulf Wars, which is permissive to ground component commanders . . . but restrictive to the employment of air power. The FSCL, however, is merely symptomatic of the Army’s desire to control a large [area of operations]—and all the resources of the other services entering that [area of operations]—to execute its operational doctrine. This limits the employment and effectiveness of fixed-wing air power—which is more effective than organic Army systems for deep operations—in operations short of the FSCL but forward of the range of divisional indirect fire systems. . . . [Many] of the purported lessons learned about the relative roles of air and ground power since the end of the Cold War have been interpreted within service perspectives—perspectives shaped by experience and culture—and this has the effect of sustaining the status quo. Much work remains to attain a truly joint American warfighting system.68

  The lead author of the most thorough assessment of U.S. Army operations throughout the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom wrote more directly in that regard that notwithstanding much “chest-thumping” over the alleged achievement of unprecedented cross-service harmony, the persistent friction that bedeviled the relations between CENTCOM’s land and air components over the ownership and control of joint battlespace throughout much of the three-week offensive “drove home the point that we really still don’t fight joint campaigns.”69 Perhaps this conclusion may be safely regarded as the main downside lesson from the Iraqi Freedom experience.70

  On the plus side, however, the air component in the campaign against Hussein’s regime had everything to do with allied ground forces’ freedom from attack and freedom to attack. In fulfilling its roster of combat tasks in the campaign, allied air power did not just “support” the land component by “softening up” enemy forces. More often than not, it conducted wholesale destruction of Iraqi ground forces prior to and independently of allied ground action. On other occasions, it both supported allied ground actions and was supported by them in shaping enemy force dispositions for more effective attack from the air.

  The Iraqi Freedom experience further demonstrated that the air assets in all services are at the brink of a major transformation from analog to digital approaches to warfighting. Because virtually every combat aircraft that participated in Iraqi Freedom was capable of delivering GPS- and inertially aided munitions, the air component quickly exhausted its preplanned target list. With respect to target attack flexibility, air component strike missions throughout the three weeks of major combat called for a variety of weapons guidance mechanisms (both GPS and laser), fuzing options (instantaneous, delayed, or airburst), and warhead sizes (500-pound, 1,000-pound, and 2,000-pound). At least eighteen munition and fuzing combinations were available to CAOC weaponeers for
the conduct of Iraqi Freedom.

  The RQ/MQ-1 Predator and RQ-4 Global Hawk UAV platforms, which had operated together for the first time so effectively in Afghanistan, gave CAOC planners every incentive to leverage the diverse capabilities of these aircraft even more effectively during the three-week war in Iraq. Global Hawk was used to detect and geolocate such mobile targets as tanks, SAMs, and early-warning radars and then to forward this information in real time to airborne strike aircraft that were best positioned to engage those pop-up targets of opportunity. Just as the Predators had been major winners during Enduring Freedom, the Global Hawk truly came into its own in support of subsequent combat operations in Iraqi Freedom. As CAOC operators later reported, “Global Hawk’s ability to gather information on troops, equipment, SAMs, and AAA, send that information to intelligence analysts, and finally deliver it to the CAOC floor for execution reflected a process and concept that need to continue.”71

  One informed account described the “critical role” played by the array of CENTAF’s air assets “in every aspect of fighting during Iraqi Freedom, from high-intensity maneuver to low-intensity convoy security and urban or rural anti-guerilla operations. . . . At the outermost tier, beyond the FSCL, air assets shaped the battlefield by preventing operational movement by major Iraqi forces, keeping formations bottled up in Al Amarah, and preventing Republican Guard units from retreating into urban areas. Within the FSCL, air assets maintained a constant grinding action, wearing down Iraqi units well ahead of coalition ground forces. . . . This integration set aside many of the interservice disputes,” yielding a “sophisticated synergy of [ISR] sensors, command and control processors, and precision-guided munitions—a nexus that advocates of air power feel was exploited in a mature form for the first time.”72 Allied air operations were intended to facilitate the quickest possible capture of Baghdad without any major head-to-head land battles between allied and Iraqi ground forces.73 With respect to the interservice disagreements that recurred from time to time at the margins of the campaign’s conduct, the lead author of the most thorough assessment of U.S. Army operations rightly concluded that “most of the issues we quibble over, while important, are not as important as the [more] fundamental truth—it was a joint fight with problems solved by men of good will who understood the stakes. . . . At the end of the day, I have nothing but admiration for the work the air component did in Iraqi Freedom.”74